Get a Life, Chloe Brown - Talia Hibbert

Initial draw: ✰✰✰✰✰
Character development: ✰✰✰✰
Plot/Writing style: ✰✰✰ (3.5, really)
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Chloe Brown is a chronically ill computer geek with a goal, a plan, and a list. After almost - but not quite - dying, she's come up with seven directives to help her "Get a Life," and she's already completed the first: finally moving out of her glamorous family's mansion. The next items?

• Enjoy a drunken night out.
• Ride a motorcycle.
• Go camping.
• Have meaningless but thoroughly enjoyable sex.
• Travel the world with nothing but hand luggage.
• And...do something bad.

But it's not easy being bad, even when you've written step-by-step guidelines on how to do it correctly. What Chloe needs is a teacher, and she knows just the man for the job.

Redford "Red" Morgan is a handyman with tattoos, a motorcycle, and more sex appeal than ten-thousand Hollywood heartthrobs. He's also an artist who paints at night and hides his work in the light of day, which Chloe knows because she spies on him occasionally. Just the teeniest, tiniest bit.

But when she enlists Red in her mission to rebel, she learns things about him that no spy session could teach her. Like why he clearly resents Chloe's wealthy background. And why he never shows his art to anyone. And what really lies beneath his rough exterior..."

I had a hard time deciding how I felt about this book, so I've been sitting with the review for a while, but I've come to a decision and am finally ready to blog about it. The initial draw was stars across the board - as soon as I read the synopsis, I knew I wanted to read it, and getting started I was immediately pulled in. The characters are three-dimensional, well-developed, and relatable, the story is solid, and I loved Chloe. After being diagnosed with fibromyalgia, she started shielding herself from any experiences she thought might trigger her chronic pain, but following a near-death experience she has decided that needs to change. Armed with a "get a life" list, she takes the first step - moving out of her posh family home and into a small flat of her own - and now she and her cutting wit and focused determination are ready to check more items off the list.

Which is where Red comes in. Chloe immediately butted heads with her new superintendent, but it doesn't take long for the pair to realize that when one of them isn't infuriating the other, they...kind of get along? After a few verbal sparring matches, the pair begin to click, forming an unexpected partnership, and things escalate from there.

And I do mean escalate. (Spoilers incoming, you have been warned.)

Y'all...this is a present-day bodice ripper. Like, all caps. And I have no problem whatsoever with things getting steamy, but my library classifies books by genre, and this one was in plain old fiction. The summary does mention sex, but in sort of a throwaway way. Things start off like any other vanilla contemporary novel. And then BAM. You're sitting on your couch, reading away, and Red wakes up from a nap-turned-wet dream with cum on his belly. And proceeds to give himself a hand in vivid detail. I mean, things go from zero to sixty in the space of a sentence, and the heat only gets cranked (heyoooo) up from there. Again, no problem with a horny novel - I'm midway through the Bridgerton series at the moment, as a matter of fact - but generally I like knowing that's what to expect going into it, and in this case...

Maybe I missed a memo and everyone else was well aware that it was going to get hot and heavy fast, but I was very surprised, and therein lies my initial uncertainty about how I felt about the book. It took me a bit to decide if the unexpected level of spice took me out of the narrative (I mean, at one point Chloe is so ready to bone down that she describes her vagina as feeling like a CLENCHED FIST. What.), but ultimately I decided no, it did not. The storyline is great, the character growth is a thing of beauty, and the representation included is...*chef's kiss*. If you're on board with lots of filthy, sometimes public, sexytimes in your reading, I say give this book a go. Just...maybe don't read it in the same room as your mom.